Coetzee [pronounced kut-SEE'-uh], currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, said the award "came as a complete surprise - I was not even aware that the announcement was pending." He noted that a previous Nobel laureate, Saul Bellow, had also been a committee faculty member.
"Our history is such that all of a sudden ordinary people are confronted with major decisions in a way that ordinary people are usually not faced by," he told AP in 1990. "I think South Africa in the past 40 years has been a place where people have been faced with really huge, moral debts."
The son of a sheep farmer, Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940, but left South Africa for a decade after the Sharpeville shootings of 1960, when police fired on demonstrators and 70 people were killed. He worked briefly in England as a programmer for IBM and in 1969 he received a Ph.D from the University of Texas for computer-generated language.
"There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee's works," the academy citation said. "No two books ever follow the same recipe. Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward-spiraling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters."
Coetzee is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, in 1983 for "Life & Times of Michael K," and in 1999 for "Disgrace," a bestseller that has sold about 200,000 copies in the U.S. alone.
"Elizabeth Costello," his latest book, is the story of a famous Australian author who finds herself increasingly weary of public life and drawn instead toward philosophical contemplation.
Coetzee himself is a solitary figure, a quiet, soft-eyed man who rarely communicates with the media and prefers doing so by e-mail. He declined even to show up to collect his Booker prizes and would not speak to any reporters Thursday after winning the Nobel.
In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press, he sat on the stairs in the lobby of a downtown Manhattan hotel, leaning in carefully when asked a question and waiting several seconds to respond, in full, well-constructed sentences.
His books are usually brief - under 300 pages - and concentrated, focusing on the personal consequences of apartheid, the system of racial separation that brutalized South Africa's black majority. In "Life & Times of Michael K," "Waiting for the Barbarians" and others, he writes of men and women doing their best to duck under history or simply float above it.
http://www.rr.com/v5/1/my/news/story/0,2050,9002_509843,00.htmlJ.M. Coetzee honored with Booker Prize for his novel
Disgracehttp://chronicle.uchicago.edu/991104/coetzee.shtml“One thing that has struck me since getting news of the award is how many Americans know about the Booker Prize and the weight it carries. It’s my feeling that the time has come for the artificial restriction that limits consideration to novels written outside of the United States to be lifted. Then the prize will truly be an award for the best novel in the English language in a given year.”
Foe by J.M.Coetzee, reviewed by Michael Wade
http://www.uni-ulm.de/~rturrell/antho1html/wade1.htmlJ.M. COETZEE - The Man with Many Qualities
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jikje/Essay/manyqual.htmlJ.M. COETZEE - On the Edge of Revelation
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jikje/Essay/reval.htmlJ. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
http://www.artistandpolarbear.com/Nature7.htmA note about the Nobel Literature Award:
Nominees are not revealed publicly for 50 years, leaving the literary world to only guess about who was in the running. However, many of the same critically acclaimed authors are believed to be on the short list every year.
